Archive for Back to the Future

October 21, 2015. Today is the day Marty traveled to in the beginning of Back to the Future II.

This is important enough that I wanted to interrupt my already in progress AWESOME-tober-fest to throw out a bunch of Back to the Future articles I’ve written over the years. Being as big of a fan of that movie as I am, I’ve written a ton of articles remembering that movie. And it’s sequels.

Bloom is the judge, CT is the prosecution, Aaron Nix is the defense and Michael May is the expert witness. Listen to everyone put M Night on trial. Hear Bloom fall asleep during the podcast. Hear CT passionately speak out against M Night’s movies. Hear Aaron Nix speak lovingly and at great length about this director whom he clearly has a giant man crush on. It’s a great episode, and honestly, I think the best of the three trials we’ve done. Give it a shot.

Also, in case you missed it, CT and I were invited to join Jon Cross over at his podcast at The After Movie Diner. Jeeg couldn’t make it due to some rift in the time-space continuum, but CT and I roll up in our modified DMC-12 to discuss the entire Back to the Future trilogy.

It’s not exhaustive by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a solid hour and a half of three movie geeks talking about their remembrances of one of their favorite movie trilogies of all time.

Check out episode 101 of the After Movie Diner Podcast featuring CT and yours truly here.

My choice for a modern reboot is Misfits of Science. Matt talks about the TGIF lineup that contained shows like Mr Belvedere, Perfect Strangers and Full House. Tim wants to reboot Gilligan’s Island and CT tries to tackle the impossible and reboots Back to the Future. Prepare for some pretty good ideas that get thrown around. Especially mine. ALL of mine are GOLD.

I’ve spoken before of my love of the newspaper movie section. One of the coolest things about this long lost section of the ever fading newspaper is that the ads would be spruced up for whatever holiday was current. But most especially for Christmas and New Years.

So, let’s take advantage of the fact that it’s Christmas Day and look at some vintage Christmas newspaper advertisements for movies that aren’t actually Christmas movies.

Showcase Cinemas Holiday Hits (Dec 16, 1983) – Welcome to “Christmastime at the Movies” in 1983. A full page of movie ads for Showcase Cinemas featuring their “Holiday Hits of 1983”. Not one of which is a Christmas movie. And the majority of which aren’t even remotely family movies. Christine? Scarface? Sudden Impact? DC Cab? Ok, well, who doesn’t love DC Cab, especially during the holidays? But Christine and Gorky Park are filled with murder. Sudden Impact? Rape and murder. Scarface? Cocaine and murder. Yentl? Barbara Streisand. Not one of these movies would I take a child or a family member to.

Back to the Future Part II – From Dec 16, 1989, this ad is a particularly fun variation on the second of the famous Back to the Future posters. They’ve added Santa. I don’t know if this modification exists outside of this ad, but I hope and wish that it does.

Star Wars – For the 1977 Christmas season the newspaper ad for Star Wars was modified to include “in character” holiday greetings. I love the sh*t out of this.

Check yourself. Episode 41 of the Nerd Lunch Podcast is now LIVE. This week we are joined by Andrew Bloom of The Atomic Geeks.

Andrew breezes in on his Atomic Geek motor scooter and subjects CT, Jeeg and Pax to a series of Would You Rather? questions. Will CT kill Kermit the Frog or the Star Trek franchise? Will Jeeg die at the hands of Snuffy the Snuffalupagus or Big Bird? Will Pax erase the existence of the Star Wars prequels from everyone’s memory or just his own? These questions and more await you in episode 41 of the Nerd Lunch podcast.

New League assignment this week. We apparently were off last week, but Brian has thrown a very good subject for this week. He wants us to create a list of 10 favorite movies. We can pick the category. There are so many ways to slice-and-dice a list of 10 movies. It took me a while to really think about it but I think I came up with an appropriate angle for me.

If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you know I’m an aficionado of time travel in pop culture. Some say I would be an “Internet authority” on said topic (I won’t argue that). I see the movies and TV shows, I read the books. I study it. I enjoy it. Check out the numerous time travel articles I’ve written on this blog as well as Episode 3 of the Nerd Lunch podcast in which we discussed time travel (and our third most downloaded episode, btw). You can see I have something invested in this subject. So, I thought I’d list out my 10 favorite movies that feature time travel.

I realize there are going to be ones you’ll want on, but I’m giving you my list of favorite time travel movies. I’ll also include some honorable mentions at the bottom.

So, let’s get started going back…..to the future….and past. Whatever. Oh, and I don’t normally do this, but I’m actually ranking these 10 – 1. Much like time itself, the order matters.

(Via jovisala47)10. Galaxy Quest – Time travel is really only used in this movie as a small plot device at the very end, but it’s used very well. The Omega 13 is a nebulous and strange device, but it worked and both spoofed the original Star Trek’s version of time travel as well as created a fun version of time travel for the movie. Plus, I love the s**t out of this movie. The perfect spoof of classic Star Trek while simultaneously being a really good stand along sci-fi movie.(Via Harry Potter Wikia)9. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – This is another kind of a cheat. The movie doesn’t feature time travel, but uses it as a plot device towards the end. However, it’s used very well and the Time Turner itself is a fascinating little gadget. This third movie in the HP franchise is so good and having time travel at the end and also realizing Hermione has been using it from the beginning of the story, just makes it that much better.

(Via best-horror-movies.com)8. Time Crimes – This is a pretty great little suspense movie that has a plot that not only features time travel, but revolves around it. It gets a little crazy at the end, and a little confusing as well, but I really enjoy the hell out of this movie. It’s about a guy named Hector who stumbles upon a time machine and gets himself into several hairy situations when he’s sent back 30min into the past.

(Via movieslist2010)7. Groundhog Day – Not generally thought of by people as a time travel movie, but it is. Murray is trapped in what we call a “time loop” and has to live the last 24 hours over and over and over. Such a great movie even if the “time loop” is never really explained.

New assignment for the League this week. Per Brian over at Cool and Collected:

What pop culture heroes or stories would make for the ultimate crossover…

I think that’s a really good question. There’s a lot of different ways to go with this. But, honestly, the first thing that popped into my head was the germ of an idea I had several years ago. I think it would be great if Doc Brown from Back to the Future became the head scientist/mechanic for Knight Industries. I had gone far enough in my pondering to actually mock up scene (click it to see it full size):

I created this scene a year or two ago. It was an idea I had for a header for this blog. Imagine the logo of Cavalcade of Awesome being right above KITT. The idea just intrigued me. I haven’t actually thought any further than that. No plot ideas on how Doc winds up at Knight Industries, or anything like that. I just love the idea of Doc getting his hands on KITT and grafting on his own wacky modifications. Like Time Travel and a Mr Fusion. So awesome.

Another crossover I’ve actually discussed on this blog involves an Old West gunslinger and the King of Vampires. In 2010 I envisioned and casted a Billy the Kid vs Dracula movie.

I casted Emilio Estevez to reprise his role as Billy the Kid from the Young Guns movies. I also casted Sam Neill as Dracula. Sam had played an awesome evil vampire in the movie Daybreakers so I thought he’d be perfect.

Another idea that I think is a little more serious and could really work well would be a crossover between Torchwood and 24. The idea being that Torchwood decides to open up an LA office and asks Jack Bauer to be the second in command.

This concept may seem familiar to you. I discussed this idea in Episode 18 of the Nerd Lunch podcast. It was an idea explored in a nice piece of fan fiction I read for the episode. I think it was a great idea and could totally work as a real show.